


The Beginning and End of Everything

by Lynzee005



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Angst, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-09 11:14:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10410918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: Years later, with more time and history between them than they knew what to do with, Dale Cooper and Audrey Horne find themselves at a crossroad...





	1. Be My Time Bomb Lover Tonight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedemptionByFire (steelneena)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/gifts).



> Part of the Tumblr ficlet challenge, except this story blossomed into something much larger than a ficlet, so I ran with it, with steelneena's blessing (they were her prompts). Will be five chapters total once it's finished. 
> 
> Title borrowed from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, from a letter to his friend Isabelle about Zelda: "I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.”

Usually everything about it is utilitarian. No fuss carpeting, basic doorknobs, buttons for the room temperature control, one simple light switch.

Shoes that slide off, without buckles or laces. Zipper fly trousers, no pantyhose beneath the skirt, blouses and dress shirts that can be pulled off and withstand a few hours crumpled on the floor without wrinkling too badly. Condoms at the ready; extras nearby.

There’s no room for romance, no time, not even for words.

There hasn’t been for years.

 _When did it stop being about romance?_ he wonders. _When did it become like this?_

She has her back to him as she lets the deep maroon silk shirt fall from her shoulders and steps out of her pencil skirt. Both garments tumble to the floor, the gentle rustle as they slide against her skin the only sound in the room. Black lace stands in sharp contrast against the milky paleness of her skin, nearly translucent in the silver moonlight streaming in through the window. She unclasps the hooks on her bra and releases herself, then rubs the deep red marks where the straps had dug into her skin.

He’s only half-undressed but he doesn’t care. He stands up from his perch on the end of the bed and walks the distance between them until she can see him in the mirror. Gently, he replaces her hands with his own, smoothing away the lines across her shoulder blades, beneath her arms, along the undersides of her breasts.

“Your hands are cold,” Audrey says to him, catching his eyes in the mirror as he lowers his head and nuzzles her neck, his nose pressed to her pulse point. He wraps his bare arms around her, and his hands glide lower, against the softness of her belly, stopping just above the waistband of her panties. She covers his hand and guides it even further, beneath the lace, to the warm juncture of her thighs, gasping at the sensation as he began his ministrations.

“Let’s take our time,” Dale whispers against her throat, kissing a line to the base of her ear. His fingertips make small circles against her, and Audrey tilts her head back against his shoulder. “We’ve got all night.”

Audrey hums tunelessly, sighing her disappointment as she shakes her head. “Early flight...tomorrow,” she says between sighs, Dale’s had delving deeper between her legs. “New Orleans...DEA...big investigation…”

He kisses her again. “Cancel it,” he says. “Ask for a transfer to a different case.”

She half-jerks upright, hit with the epiphany he’s offered. **“I didn’t know you could do that.”**

Dale pauses, considers his next words very carefully. It’s an opening, the first one he’s had from her in a very long time

“I could reassign you. Request you,” he says, chancing a small kiss, which he delivers behind her ear. “You could come back to Philadelphia with me…”

Audrey’s body stiffens in his arms, and a pit opens in his stomach.

“Dale, you know that’s not…we shouldn’t even be talking about this,” she tells him. “No work. Nothing personal. In here it’s…”

Dale nods and sighs. _In here it’s business. Utilitarian. A no-nonsense motor hotel, once a month or whenever their schedules match up. Wherever in the country that might be._

“I know.”

“It’s what we agreed to,” she reminds him, turning to face him finally. “It’s the only way this has ever worked.”

 _And if we wanted more?_ he wonders. But of course _more_ is off the table, for reasons too plentiful to enumerate. They’ve only got the night and the sun has already set behind the trees and the buildings on the other side of the Willamette River.

He compartmentalizes his feelings, sealing them and putting them to the side the way he’s learned to for her, and lifts his hands to cup the sides of her face as he kisses her deeply. She moans into his mouth and begins working his belt open between them.

Somewhere in the depths of her overnight bag, her mobile phone begins to ring. The moment shatters, splinters of it skittering across the room to hide beneath the furniture as she stops and pulls away, pushing him backwards as she races to answer it.

“Shit…” she curses under her breath, digging for the phone. “I’m sorry, I thought I turned it off.”

“It’s okay,” he says, but she’s not listening. She’s found the mobile; she flips it open, scooping thick sections of her jaw-length hair behind her ear as she speaks, turning her back to him again.

Her hushed tones tell Dale everything he needs to know about who the caller is. His heart sinks.

“I’m in Portland,” she says. “No, Oregon…tomorrow morning…I don’t know, early…do we have to do this now?”

Dale sits back on the bed, refastening his belt buckle as he does.

Her shoulders sag. She crosses her arm over her abdomen and the conversation becomes indistinct, murmured to the wall and into the phone she’s clutching in her right hand. Seconds later, she hangs up, clapping the phone closed and letting her arm drop at her side.

He waits a beat, then two, before saying anything.

“Audrey?”

She turns, startled, as if she’s forgotten that he’s there. Her smile is unconvincing as she wipes tears from her cheeks. Dale stands, moved to comfort her (about what, he doesn’t know), but she comes to him instead, crossing the room to stand in front of him.

“Don’t say anything,” she begs him. “Please, Dale. We’ll be lovers tonight, okay? Just…”

He’s never been a match for her tears, and now is no exception. Dale nods, feeling his heart surge in his chest as she kisses him as she once again re-opens his trousers. She loosens the belt, then the fly, pushing everything down over his hips and working him to erection with desperate hands as he struggles to maintain his composure. When she pulls away again, he groans in disappointment before realizing that she’s dropped to her knees, and his mind goes blank as she takes the full length of him into her mouth.

“God,” he sighs, grasping the bedpost for support to keep from falling over. Heat rises in his cheeks and he lets his head fall back, lost in the sensation. He’d forgotten how good she was, how careful and precise and _incredible_...

She purrs her approval, and it’s all he can do to hold back from losing himself right then and there. Lifting his head again, he watches her; she looks up at him through her lashes, and with trembling hands he smoothes her hair off her forehead, stroking her cheek as his hand falls.

His fingers come away damp from the tears she’d been crying only moments before.

_This isn’t how it should be..._

“A-Audrey,” he whispers, his voice catching on the arousal sitting thick in the back of his throat.

She stops. “Did I do something wrong?” she asks.

Dale gives her a look. “Not in the slightest,” he says, allowing a small chuckle as he exhales. “Come here.”

He’s determined to make her forget whatever was in that phone call, because whatever exists outside the door to their room doesn’t matter and shouldn’t infect what happens _in here._ So he lifts her to her feet and spins them both until she’s sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Da— ”

He pushes a finger against her lips and shakes his head, then motions her to get on the bed. She giggles, grins, leans on her elbows; he kicks his trousers away and hooks his thumbs around the edge of her panties, and as she pushes herself back onto the bed, the lace fabric comes away in his hands. These, he drops to the floor, then bends his head lower to finish what he started.

She blooms around him as his fingers slip within; he curls and uncurls his digits, his lips and tongue matching pace. Her body begins to writhe and hum in front of him. With his free hand, he reaches for her, finding her hand fisting the blankets beside her. Threading her fingers between his, he feels her bear down; his name arrives on her lips like an incantation, devotional in its repetition, rising in pitch with every breathless pronouncement.

He stops just before her climax, stroking himself hard and crawling toward her on the bed. Her groan amuses him; he can see that her face is flushed, her lips a slackened ‘O’ as she runs a hand through her hair. Her eyes are closed.

“Dale?”

They’re at eye-level. When she opens her heavy lids, he’s right there, and he tells her so: “I’m here.”

It seems to be enough for her. She lifts her hips to meet his, and it’s all the invitation he needs to bury himself inside. She gasps, hooking a leg around his hip; he catches her on the exhale, slanting across her  mouth as he drives deeper. He drags her hand above her head and pins it to the pillows, his other hand firmly on her hip, holding her fast beneath him.

Audrey’s eyes shock open, and her sharp breath in tells him more than her words ever could: she’s coming unglued. Breaking away from the kiss, he catches her jaw, the soft skin at the base of her ear, and the mewling moans from the back of her throat urge him on. She rocks her pelvis as much as she can against him, and he against her, until her breathing hitches. Her free hand grips the bedsheets; she turns her face into his neck, suffocating her cries as she comes hard against him.

The pressure coils until he can barely stand it, and with Audrey clenched tightly around him and falling apart in his arms, Dale can’t help but follow her. He thrusts twice more through her roiling orgasm and finishes, groaning her name as his head falls to rest against her shoulder.

Beads of perspiration stand up against his shoulders and along her hairline; the lazy swirl of the ceiling fan in the centre of the room does little to cool them. But Dale can’t bring himself to move away from Audrey’s heat. He breathes her in like oxygen, great gulping air-fulls that his lungs crave, like he hasn’t breathed in weeks.

In truth it _has_ been weeks. Six, to be exact. A longer than normal stretch. He wonders what she'd been doing all that time...

 _But don’t think about that now_ , he scolds himself. He feels her hand, still intertwined with his, and squeezes it against the pillow.


	2. So, We're Alone Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In afterglow by midnight and remembrances about their shared past, Dale and Audrey can’t find repose…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song title from "Closer" by Joshua Radin.

It’s midnight. Soft stillness surrounds them both as they burrow in bedsheets, warm and close. He’s been watching her sleep, because he can’t. He doesn’t even try. Every minute he spends in lost consciousness is a minute he won’t have with her, and minutes are all they have.

It feels like it’s all they’ve _ever_ had: Minutes stolen from vengeful Fortune and Time itself.

But Dale pushes those thoughts from his mind. Casting the two of them in some grand Greek tragedy feels foolish and insincere. They aren’t Classical heroes. They’re mortals caught up in a web of their own design, because of a series of bad choices and missteps they’d made reacting to their own fear—

_No—your fear, and yours alone. Audrey was never afraid._

Looking at her from his pillow, he wonders how he could have been so stupid, to let her go when he had the chance all those years ago, and how he’s still managed to be so lucky. To just have her there seems to be a gift, one he isn’t worthy of.

To ask for _more_ seemed _…_?

Audrey sighs, and his attention breaks and returns to her. She rests her head on her pillow. No makeup on her face, her smooth skin relaxed in her repose. They haven't spoken a word since she woke up from a terrible nightmare crying, his name on her lips and pupils horror-blown. She’s calmed down enough now that her breath is no longer catching in her chest the way it had been when she first woke a few minutes earlier. It calms him to see her calm. If Audrey were ever to be _truly_ afraid of anything—outside of these dreams, of course—he wouldn’t know what to do with himself…

“What was it about?”

She doesn’t answer for a long time. When she does, her voice is clouded with sleep and lingering tendrils of exhausted distress. “It’s the same one I always have,” she says, words cracking as they wisp from her lips. “Since One Eyed Jack’s.”

Mention of _that place_ pushes a sharp finger of shame right into his gut, and the shockwave of it ripples up to his throat. It’s been nearly ten years and he’s still heartsick over what happened.

Clearly, Audrey hasn’t recovered either. He reaches out to caress her face as she continues.

“I’m in a body of water,” she says, closing her eyes. “Murky water, like a dead lake. I’m trying to swim but I can’t. I’m tangled in weeds. They feel like sea creatures.” One hand starts to wave; Audrey has always been a hand-talker for as long as he’s known her, and even in half-sleep, this is her default. “They wrap around and around and around my legs, and then my arms, and then my chest and my throat… and I can’t keep my head above water…and then I’m sinking. I can’t move and I’m being pulled down, down, down...”

Audrey’s nightmares are always about drowning. Dale’s are always about being consumed by fire. He thinks that must be note-worthy.

But he doesn't say anything. His fingers outline her eyebrow as he moves strands of hair off her forehead. The hand she’s been waving in the air falls to his other hand, which lays palm up on the pillow between them. She begins tracing patterns against the creases and folds of his skin.

“I hate this dream,” she says, with all the tone and cadence of a petulant child.

“It’s a frightening thing to imagine your own death.”

“Especially when you wake up alone ninety percent of the time,” she says, and immediately she thinks better of it. Her face changes, and even in the darkness of the room, he can see that she knows she’s misspoken, said too much, and wishes she could retract.

Dale doesn’t think it’s possible for the ache in his chest to hurt any more than it already does, but _those words_ do it somehow. He suddenly feels like crying.

“Audrey,” he whispers.

“Don’t,” she says, simply, and it’s more than enough to shut him up. She laughs a little and rolls onto her back. “God, I could use a drink…”

“Really?” he asks, his own sudden usefulness buoying his flagging spirits. He moves to get out of bed. “What do you want? Does this place even have a mini bar?”

She giggles. “I’m sure it doesn’t,” she says as she props herself up against the pillows. “I shouldn’t anyway. Really.”

He turns to look at her, trying to read her reaction from several feet away now, the gulf between them vast and void of light. He narrows his eyes, as though squinting will let him see better. “Coffee?”

“Decaf?”

 _Suppose that’s sensible,_ he says. _It is midnight, and she has an early plane…_

He nods and stands, searches the floor for his discarded underwear.

And suddenly he’s making a pot of decaf in the room’s coffee machine on the counter in the bathroom, wondering how it all came to this.

“Do you still have your dreams?” Audrey asks from the other room. “The ones about that place you went to?”

Dale fills the small glass pot with water and pours it into the reservoir of the machine. “No,” he tells her, but that’s a lie and he knows he can’t pull it off. He lifts his head and looks into the mirror— something he’s only recently been able to do without panicking over what face he’ll see reflected back at him. He’s got circles under his eyes; he hasn’t slept well in weeks.

_Six weeks…_

He shakes his head. “Well, sometimes.”

The coffee begins to brew and Dale turns off the light and steps back into the room. Audrey is propped up in the bed against a mound of pillows. Her knees are drawn to her chest.

“When I was in Seattle,” she tells him, “And you were still in Twin Peaks recovering, I used to try to send you my thoughts before I went to sleep, hoping that you’d dream about me.”

Dale grins as he rounds the end of the bed and comes back to his side. “That was your doing all along?” he teases.

She smiles and shrugs. “It’s ridiculous, I know.”

“No, it’s sweet,” he says, climbing back into the warmth of the covers.

“I felt like such a little girl back then,” she tells him. “A little schoolgirl with a silly crush…”

She rests her hands on her knees. Dale reaches up and pulls one of them down; just like all those times before, their fingers slide against one another’s and lock themselves into place. It’s comfortable, familiar. Like a car’s tires sliding back into the grooves on an icy snow-covered road; it just happens, and you’re better off not fighting it.

He rubs his thumb against hers. “I never thought that about you.”

Audrey lets out a small chuckle. “I believe the phrase ‘ _You’re a high school girl_ ’ came up more than once during the course of our brief relationship.”

“Well I can’t speak to the specifics,” he tells her. “But I can assure you that I never once viewed you as silly, or what you felt as simply a crush.”

“No?”

“No.” He blinks again, slowly. “Audrey, I had—have always had—incredible respect for you.” He’s shocked he has to say it; she seems shocked to hear it. _How could she be so unaware of how he felt._

 _You weren’t exactly in your rightest mind for a while,_ he reminds himself. _And before that you spurned her advances…_

“You were so sure of everything.”

“I wasn’t so sure of anything.”

“Well you seemed it,” he tells her. “I was the one who had no idea what he was doing, or why he was doing it, or how he’d manage once he did it.”

She lowers her eyes, and the silent seconds pass like hours before she lifts them again to his face. “You regret us.”

It’s a statement of fact, the way she says it, and it hurts to hear because she _believes_ it. “No, Audrey, I don’t. I’ve never…not even for a moment…this?” he asks, motioning between them with a lazy wave of two fingers. “How could I regret anything that led to this? _This_ is one thing that could _never_ be bad,” he says, adding: “It's about the only thing we've ever done right.”

“You mean the sex?”

“I mean…” he grins, the first flicker of arousal beginning to flame once again in his lower abdomen. “Okay, yes…”

Audrey’s grin is mischievous; even in the darkness, he can tell—there are so many things he’s learned about her in the years they’ve been doing this, and the sound of her smiling in the dark is one of them—and it fans his desire. “The sex _is_ good…”

He sees no sense in arguing, because she’s right; sex with Audrey Horne has set the bar immeasurably high. This is just a fact he must live with, like the fact that the square root of a negative number is imaginary or that the belligerents in the War of 1812 were the United States on one side and the British Empire in Canada on the other, or that the mere sight of her blue eyes has always been enough to send his heart rate skyrocketing, even back then, when she _was_ a high school girl and when he should have known better but…

_What I wanted and what I needed existed in the same person all along._

Dale smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “We do that part really well.”

“Except for the first time.”

Taken aback, Dale manages a choked laugh. “ **Oh come on, it wasn’t** **_that_ ** **bad.”**

“Not bad, just…high expectations, that’s all,” she says, her voice soft, tremulous. “I was so nervous.”

Somehow he couldn’t imagine her being nervous; the thought that she might have been had never once entered his mind. “I had no idea,” he admits.

“I bluster convincingly.”

“Apparently.”

She scoffs. “I’d run off to Seattle,” she remembers.

He remembers too—it hasn’t been so long that he’d forgotten, not that he could forget even if he’d wanted to—but he lets her tell the story because it’s one of his favourites, something he tells himself when he’s alone at night and she’s a million miles away instead of where she ought to be, which is in his bed next to him.

“It was fall…nearly winter. Classes were almost out for Christmas break. You’d come up from Twin Peaks to see me.”

He takes over the story there. “I just got in the car and drove. I had no idea where you lived, what classes you were in. I just…hoped.” He squeezes her hand. “All on a whim, I might add. Compelled, one might say.”

Audrey pulls her hand out of his and opens it, palm up, and begins to trace patterns against his love line. “But you found me.”

“Carrying that huge art history textbook across the street to a coffee shop.”

She smiles at him. “You took me to dinner. That little restaurant downtown.”

“We had Chinese.”

“And then—”

His mind fills in the blanks when she stops talking but the story doesn’t need to be told. Audrey had been eager, breathless; truth be told, so was he. Six months trapped in hell, and another two months after that in recovery…he’d have given his left arm and both legs to be able to feel _something_ again.

In the end all he had to give away was his heart.

“We didn’t sleep that night,” she whispers. “The first of many nights in hotel rooms…”

She’s still tracing patterns on his skin, but her movements have slowed. He wants to be inside her, to know what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, for even the briefest of moments, because _this_ is driving him crazy. He can’t intuit her, never could; she defies him at every turn, the only woman in his life who could do that.

It makes him ask questions he shouldn’t. “Is _this…_ better than—”

Audrey eyes him, and _that_ —the cold gleam as she levels a gaze in his direction—is unmistakable. “Don't, Dale…”

He bluffs through a lie. “I was…just going to ask if it was better than before.”

She pauses and breathes in. “Oh.”

 _Crisis averted_ . He sighs and counts his luck. Because of course what he _really_ wants to know is how he stacks up against the great man who married her, the handsome entrepreneur who had swept her off her feet in ways Dale never could. He feels the sting of not-knowing twisted deep in his stomach. But she’s drawing hearts and circles again with her middle finger against the palm of his hand and he can’t take his eyes off of her, and soon he's forgotten his jealousies entirely.

“God you’re beautiful.”

“Stop it,” she whispers. “I’m going grey already. I’m not even thirty yet…”

He smiles. “It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever…”

Audrey shakes her head; she won’t look him in the eye. “You know...I really did love you.”

 _Did?_ He wants to ask, but he swallows the word before it makes it to his lips.

“Do you ever feel bad about it?” she asks.

“About what?”

It doesn’t matter in the end; Audrey backtracks admirably. “I know...we shouldn’t be talking about that.”

“That was _your_ rule,” he reminds her.

After a long pause, she nods her head. “Let’s not fight, okay?”

She’s still tracing. He moves his hand, grasps hers, holds it tight. “Audrey?”

“Dale Cooper…” she laughs softly, sadly. “You were always such a romantic, but…”

“But what?” he asks, hearing an edge of pleading in his voice as he launches down the road he promised himself he wouldn’t go down. He closes his fingers around hers. “Why is this the best we can hope for?”

Audrey doesn’t look at him. She stiffens. When she pulls her hand away from his and lifts it to her face, he’s almost certain she’s wiping away tears, once again.

He wishes they were still talking about dreams. He can fight the dreams. It’s the real world he was never so good at dealing with.

She pivots, pulling away from him, and it's like a vacuum at his side—she takes half his breath and all the warmth with her as she slides herself out of bed. "Coffee’s ready,” she whispers, and he loses her to the darkness of a room already black as sin.


	3. But He Just Won't Let Her Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fights and lies and decaf coffee...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Stars' "The Big Fight"

Maybe it’s because it’s decaf, or maybe it’s because he’s nervous, but the coffee Dale and Audrey consume as they sit there—half-dressed, in the cool moonlight filtering in through thinning, patchy rainclouds outside the window—sours his stomach. He barely finishes one cup before leaving it to cool on the TV stand.

Audrey finishes hers but refuses to put the cup down; it dangles from her thumb, hooked through the small porcelain handle. She sits in the middle of the bed, her knees drawn up in front of her, ankles crossed; she floats on top of the blankets, like it’s whipped cream and she’s the cherry.

It’s just before four am and it’s been raining all night. They haven’t spoken in twenty minutes. _Three complete cycles of the room air conditioner_ , he thinks, though he doesn’t know why the air conditioning is even on, seeing as how it’s late autumn in Portland and it’s fifty-four degrees outside. Hotel air dries out his skin, and Dale wonders why he’s never really ever done anything about that, invested in good lotion or something, since he’s spent most of his adult life and all of his professional one shuttling between hotels and motels across the country for one reason or another.

For work— _one reason_ —and for Audrey— _another_.

He would have thought he’d learned.

He hates the way he has an opinion about all of this.

They’ve been down this road enough times to know, both of them, that the seedy part of their meeting is next. Soon they’ll pick up their clothes and get dressed. They’ll pack their bags, saying nothing. They’ll kiss at the door. And the sun will still be an hour from creeping over the horizon, but they’ll have scurried to their cars already, and will be driving out of the parking lot in opposite directions—back to reality, to the lives they lead when they aren’t here, in the only place that seems to matter.

To him, anyway. He has no idea how Audrey feels about any of this.

“When will I see you again?"

She looks up from her spot on the bed, and it’s hard to tell in the half-light but he thinks she looks hurt. A shadow crosses her face; she simply shrugs. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

Dale nods. “I just thought I’d save us some time,” he says. “You know...we always end up rushing away before dawn, I figured–”

“ _Is_ this the best we can hope for?”

Her question catches him off guard. She’s not usually the one to ask these things; in fact, now that he thought about it, he was always the one questioning, chasing, waiting. She deigned to come to him. Like she was doing him a favour. Because in all their years together, he has never heard her put voice to the thoughts he’s been battling non-stop. It gives him hope; maybe she’s not angry with him anymore. Maybe she’s softening the battle lines…

But before he can clarify, she’s changed tack. The moment is over.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” she says.

Dale watches her stride from the edge of the bed to the bathroom. She glows as she walks—an indistinct shape, a blur of porcelain skin in the half-light—like a ghost, and it hurts to admit it but that’s how she acts too: ghost-like, showing up one moment and disappearing the next. He can’t pin her down. He can’t hold her still.

He hasn’t been able to do that in seven years. If he was ever able to do that at all.

 _This is your penance_ , he reminds himself. _You’re getting what you deserve._

He sees her briefly backlit by the bathroom vanity in the space between turning on the light and shutting the door; soon he hears the water running, and his mind wanders, until he finds himself wishing he were the water coursing over her body. He envies its closeness to her, wonders what it might have been like to wake up to _this_ every morning…

_It could have been yours. It could have all been yours. She offered it to you and you turned her down._

With a shake of his head, he stands up. He adjusts the thermostat—it _was_ set far too low, and he knows how much Audrey hates being cold when she gets out of the shower—and then starts tidying the room. It’s so late it’s early. Always a race against the sun. And she has a plane to catch.

 _New Orleans_ , he thinks to himself as he picks up his coffee mug and walks to the bed to retrieve hers. _DEA investigation…_

He sets the mugs down on the dresser and begins to pick up pieces of Audrey’s clothes, scattered about where she let them fall hours earlier. He folds the black silk blouse—lingering traces of her perfume drifting up to him as he rustles the fabric—and stoops to retrieve her bra from the floor, thinking about the domestic bliss that laundry day with Audrey would almost certainly have been. Separating loads, darks and lights and delicates, arguments over fabric softener in the towel load and whose turn it is to fold.

A niggling thought that he’d ignored all night starts to prickle in the back of his mind as he lifts her bra to his nose and picks up her heady scent embedded in the fabric. He gently arranges the bra against the blouse and stares at the two articles of clothing as the thought  reaches its natural conclusion:

_There is no joint FBI/DEA investigation in New Orleans right now…_

He’s been Special Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia office now for a while. She knows that. She knows that he would know the ins and outs of every Regional Office. She knows he’d put two and two together eventually.

This is how he justifies it to himself when he turns and heads back to the desk, where her things sit out in the open.  It isn’t as though he means to snoop, but when he sees her purse open on the desk—her plane ticket there, sandwiched between her wallet and the inside of the bag—the urge overruns him. it takes nothing at all—a tilt of his head—to read that the plane she’s catching is scheduled to depart mid-afternoon for Reno, Nevada, not early morning for New Orleans…

Dale measures his options carefully before lifting the ticket from her bag, and is shocked to discover there are two. His heart sinks, falling to the floor between his ankles.

_Two tickets. To Reno._

Trying not to panic, he walks over to the door to the bathroom and lifts his hand to knock, resting his knuckles against the cheaply veneered particle board before rapping four times, hoping it’s loud enough to hear.

“Yeah?” she calls out over the gush of the water.

He opens the door. “When does your plane leave?” he asks. _Did that sound casual? Is she going to suspect that you know something is up?_

_What are you doing, Dale?_

“Um…ten o’ clock I think?”

He looks down at the ticket— _Tickets,_ he corrects, slipping the stiff papers against one another. “You think?”

She doesn’t respond immediately, and for a moment he wonders if maybe she didn’t hear. But then she shuts the water off, and the deafening silence of the steam-filled bathroom makes his ears ring.

When Audrey steps out of the shower and sees him holding the tickets, she isn’t surprised. She doesn’t even seem mad. She grabs a towel off the rack and wraps it around her midsection, tucking the corner against her breast. “You went through my purse.”

“They were sticking out of the top.”

A second towel finds its way into her hands and she scrubs it over her head, her mid-length hair a sudden frizzy mess as she pulls away and tosses the towel to the counter. Then she reaches for the tickets.

Watching her, he can’t help but be fascinated. She holds the tickets so gently between her thumb and forefinger; her eyes take in the writing as if it’s the first time she’s ever seen a planet ticket before. He sees her throat bob as she swallows. “I can explain.”

“Audrey—I don’t want explanations. I don’t want you to lie,” he says.

“It’s not that simple—”

“Two tickets?” he asks. “To Reno?”

The towel around her body slips a little and she huffs as she picks it back up, as if _that_ is the most annoying thing to be happening to her in that moment. “ **You’ve been so selfish lately** …”

Dale doesn’t even have the wherewithal to question her statement. It’s so off-the-charts insane, all he can do is gawk at her for several seconds before his brain and his mouth begin to work in tandem again. “ _I’ve_ been selfish?” he asks.

Audrey shakes her head and pushes past him into the room, muttering. “I don’t have to take this.”

He follows her at a short distance, suddenly enraged and struggling to hold it together. “How in the world have I been selfish?” he asks her as she picks up where he left off. “I don’t get to call you. I don’t get to _contact_ you. I wait, sometimes for weeks, in between our little trysts for _you_ to contact _me_ because _you’re_ the one who’s married, Audrey, don’t forget _that_ little bit of information—”

Dropping the towel to the floor, she shivers—the heater hasn’t come on yet, indicating it might be broken and that’s why the A/C is the only part running—and steps into her panties. “Oh, okay,” she says. “My marriage is what is keeping us apart. My mistake. I’m so sorry.”

Dale is incredulous. He watches her pull on her bra, slipping the straps over her shoulder and adjusting herself within it. “Is there _another_ thing keeping us apart?” he asks.

She whirls to face him and jabs a finger in his direction. “You!” she says, shouting the word, with such pain in her voice Dale can scarcely believe it. “It’s you Dale! It’s always been you! You and your… _neuroses._ Your fucking _morals._ All this high-minded crap about needing to figure things out…”

Dale wishes she wouldn’t yell. He worries about the neighbours, of getting a call from management.

But she isn’t through, and he couldn’t stop her even if he tried. Her damp hair hangs in waves around her face; she shuts her eyes and runs her hands over it with a low growl of disapproval and frustration. “God _damn_ it, Dale! If you would have asked me, I would have gone to the _ends of the fucking Earth_ for you. I would have done _whatever_ you wanted. But you _didn’t want me_ . It was _too hard_ and you were _afraid_ , and so you know what? Yeah, I blame you for what happened. Because John Justice- _fucking_ -Wheeler came back from the Amazon and I was so mad at you that I married him. And look at the fucking _disaster_ that’s turned out to be.”

“I know,” he whispers, even though he doesn’t know, not quite, what it is she’s talking about.

She’s still not through, though. “Everything I do I do because of you. I fell head over heels for you the moment I first saw you. I nearly got myself killed trying to help you. You inspired me to be better, to do good, and I chained myself to a bank vault the day a bomb goes off.” She shakes her head. “I got a degree in psychology so I can work at the FBI _with you_. I let you move into my apartment in Seattle so that I can _help you_ get better after you unglue yourself from whatever it was that happened to you. We spend four years together.” She looks at him, eyes flashing anger and madness. “ _Four years_ , Dale! We had a _life_. We were _building a life_. And suddenly things got _too hard_ , and you left me alone. So I married a man _to_ _spite you_. And now I have to spend the _rest of my life_ existing in a shallow orbit around you because I just can’t _not_ be around you.” She leans against the wall, sinking into it. “Fuck, Dale. If it hadn’t been for you…”

“Audrey.”

She begins to cry, and the inevitable knock on the wall next door breaks the moment in half. Dale takes  a step towards her.

“I live in Reno,” she says.

He stares at her. _No, you live in Seattle. With Jack Wheeler_. He wants to say. But he doesn’t. Instead he simply shakes his head. “I didn’t know—”

“Do you know _why_ I live in Reno?”

He can do little but watch as she stalks over to her work valise and pulls out a file folder. She tosses it to the bed. “Go ahead. It’s all there.”

Dale stares at the manila folder as two more insistent thumps on the wall float dimly in and then out of his sphere of awareness. He crosses the room and lifts the corner of the folder. In the dark, and without his glasses, it’s hard to see. But he can make out the top line on the first page. And the top line on the next page. And the next.

_Establishing Residency in the State of Nevada…_

_Legal Fee Schedule…_

_Petition for Dissolution of Marriage…_

“Is this…?”

Audrey doesn’t say anything, but her tears have turned to sobs, which have turned to heaves, and she claps a hand over her mouth and races to the bathroom. He hears her throwing up moments later.

He wonders first about how angry and upset she must be for this to make her vomit; then he wonders about the quality of the coffee he’d brewed, since his own stomach still isn’t feeling entirely even-keeled. Setting the folder back down on the bed, he walks over to the door to check on her.

_She’s divorcing Jack. She needs to do it quickly._

She’s hunched over the toilet, her forehead against her arm. She’s crying.

His mind is reeling. “Audrey…”

She groans. “Dale, please…”

But he’s desperate; a dog with a bone. And the only thing he could imagine—the only possible reason for all of this—tumbles from his lips: “Is there someone else?” he asks.

With one hand, she clumsily flushes the mess away and pushes herself up with the other until she’s facing him. The room still smells like the heavily perfumed hotel toiletries; the overwhelming scent is nauseating in and of itself.

What’s _more_ nauseating is the look of utter and absolute disgust on Audrey’s face as she looks at him.

“I’m going now,” is all she says.

He can’t stop her. She whirls through the room, picking up and putting on her skirt and her blouse, tying her wet hair back in a ponytail as she staggers around unsteady in her shoes. She packs her purse again; she grabs her overnight bag and valise. Dale can scarcely believe it when, moments after she bolted from the bathroom, she’s opened the door to the hallway and is barreling past the hotel manager, who stands on the other side of the door, his hand poised to knock and remind them to be quiet.

Dale—clad in only his boxers and plain white t-shirt—moves to run after her.

“Sir, if you could just—” the manager whines.

But Dale isn’t listening. He watches Audrey’s back as she retreats down the hallway, leaving him—stunned and spinning—in her wake.


	4. I Know I Was A Lot Of Things, But I Am Good, I Am Grounded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revelations in a rainstorm...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "I Need My Girl" by The National.

It takes a moment for Dale to regroup. The front desk manager leaves him with a terse and tired warning about disturbing the other guests, which Dale nods through but doesn’t absorb. As he shuts the door Dale replays everything in his head. Every word, every gesture. He’s trying to find out where he went wrong.

But of course he knows…

 _Neuroticism, paranoia, accusations…_ he shakes his head and presses the heel of his hand to his brow. He’s never been like that before, so full of suspicion. She’s never given him any reason to not trust her. _What happened today to change that?_

 _A million little things_ , he thinks. Crying on the phone. Her distance from him. The nightmare. Revelations about divorce notwithstanding, she’d given him plenty of clues that all was not well. What else was he supposed to think? What else could he have done?

 _You could have not backed her into a corner,_ he tells himself. _Audrey Horne has never taken kindly to being caged._

He knows that’s exactly what he did: he went from loving her to wanting to possess her, all because he feared she was slipping away from him.

_And now she is gone, and you’re the one who pushed her away._

He had never felt more foolish.

Gutted, he steps away from the door and surveys the room. She’d packed up so quickly and in such a mad rush of sound and fury that neither of them had noticed Audrey’s plane tickets and the manila folder, which are still sitting on the bed where she’d left them.

Gripped in the vise of panic, he freezes, wondering if she has left already, if she’ll be coming back for it, if he’ll ever see her again…

When his legs start working, he paces to the bed and throws on his trousers, heaped on the floor, and his shoes. He takes the folder, shoving everything inside it, and stalks out the door, retracing Audrey's steps down the hall and to the lobby. 

It doesn’t occur to him to look at the documents, to examine them in detail, until he’s already halfway down. When he gets to the front window, he peers out into the darkened parking lot, but he doesn’t see her lights, her car, anything…

Convinced that she’s left, and that no harm could possibly come from snooping _now_ , he opens the folder and peeks through the documents.

The pages are out of order, some upside down and backwards, but he scans each one: a rental agreement for an apartment in Reno, signed documents with a Reno divorce lawyer, pages of photocopied documentation—marriage license, registration, her Pennsylvania driver's license—and as he does a picture begins to form: of Audrey researching quickie divorces, phoning around to find an attorney, setting up her apartment, all of it within the last three weeks— _Around the time she cancelled our last meeting..._ Dale thinks, recalling their planned rendezvous in Denver at the start of the month and how, less than a day before they'd been scheduled to meet, she had telephoned to tell him it was off, with no further explanation. 

There were pages and pages of documents, some filled with legal jargon, some in layman's terms. Audrey had circled and highlighted and underlined relevant passages; Dale’s eyes flew across the pages.

“Residency requirements for Complaint Divorces mandate a six-week period during which the complainant must prove primary residency within the Reno area by filing a Resident Witness Affidavit from another Reno resident who has seen you residing within Reno for six weeks,” Dale reads to himself. _Three weeks left._ He continues: “During this time, we will make good faith attempts at locating your spouse to serve them with divorce papers. Total cost for this service ranges from five-hundred to eight hundred dollars… ”

Dale shakes his head and flips the page, where Audrey’s copy of the appropriate legal form rests. Her impeccable hand flows across the page, long and unbroken, in blue ink: _irreconcilable differences, no shared assets, no children…_

_Why is she in such a rush to get this divorce finalized?_

The plane tickets are last, and Dale lifts them to examine them further. PDX-RNO, departing at three pm that afternoon. There is the gate information, the numbers and barcodes that indicate the fare type and the food option Audrey had selected when she purchased the tickets. It has everything on it—everything up to and including the passenger’s names, meant for the flight manifest.

Audrey’s name is on the aisle seat ticket; his name is on the other. He stares at it until it stops make sense, until the letters jumble and blend and no longer possess meaning. And then he shakes his head and takes it all in again.

It was like being suckerpunched in the gut. All the wind left his lungs; he felt like crying.

_You thought there was somebody else, and all along, she was carrying a plane ticket in your name…_

His bare toes in his shoes bother him and he has no coat on, but he marches out into the rain anyway, hoping against hope that she hasn’t driven off yet, that she is still sitting in the car, feeling silly for forgetting the documents and debating how she would come back in to get them.

He realizes he doesn’t even know what kind of car she’s driving.

Despair sets in as the cold rain soaks his shirt and his teeth begin to chatter.

Then:

“Dale?”

He looks up and sees Audrey in the middle of the driveway. She is still soaking wet, from the rain as much as her shower. Her hair plasters to her face; he can tell she’s been crying. He’s never been happier to see her in his entire life.

“Audrey,” he walks towards her. “You’re shivering." 

“So are you.”

For a moment neither of them moves; Dale rubs his arm with his hand, and Audrey unlocks her rental car, a few meters away. It beeps, the interior light comes on. Overwhelmed with gratitude for a warm and dry place to sit, he rounds the front end of the car and climbs into the passenger seat.

When Audrey slides behind the steering wheel and shuts the door, only their harried, frigid breaths and the pounding of the rain on the roof of the car can be heard. The cab light fades off. Audrey keys the ignition and starts the heater.

Dale closes the folder and hands it to her. “I thought you might—”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t know _what_ to think.”

She glances down at the folder and takes it from his hands, brushing droplets from the cover.

“Does he beat you or something?” Dale asks, unable to keep his curiosity at bay.

Audrey surprises him with a laugh. “Fuck… Jack and I haven’t been in the same room together since Daddy’s last birthday and that was in August. He doesn’t beat me. We barely see each other.”

Dale stares at her, incredulous, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’re married, and you don’t see each other?” It didn’t compute.

Audrey speaks without passion or malice. “He travels a lot. He was never going to be home, never going to be okay with being tied down. We haven’t lived together for years, Dale. Our marriage has been over basically since the moment it began.” 

The revelation has stunned him to almost complete silence, and he’s not sure exactly why. Obviously things had never been perfect—she wouldn’t have started this with him if it had been, and she was _absolutely_ the one to start it.

But he’d never allowed himself to entertain the notion that things were _that bad_. That would have given him hope, and he couldn’t have continued in that state for long…not without making some kind of grand, stupid gesture and mucking the whole thing up royally anyway.

Dale furrows his brow and tries to reconcile all the facts before him. “But why?” he asks. “Why stay with someone—”

She shrugs. “I had no competing offers.”

Dale wants to rant, but he bites his tongue.

Audrey continues. “The call I got tonight… my attorneys served him with the divorce papers. I don’t think he’ll sign them, but there’s time. He knows this isn’t working, that it was never going to work, not while…”

And there it is. _Hope_. He wants to cut his own leg off; it would hurt less than hoping for a second chance with Audrey.

Breathless, he asks. “While what?”

She sighs. “You can’t stay married to one person when you’re in love with someone else, Dale.”

She doesn’t look at him.

Dale watches as she splays her shivering hands over the steering wheel and then wraps them around her middle, tucking one arm under the other and resting her other hand against her stomach.

“Are you going to throw up again?”

She shakes her head. “Is that all you have to say?”

He stammers. “I-I just…I’m at a loss for words here.”

“Why?” she asks, her mirthless laugh muffled by the car’s interior. “Because I didn’t think I hid any of this exceptionally well. You’re supposed to be this master detective, aren’t you?”

 _Not when it comes to you_ , he wants to say.

Audrey sets the folder down on the middle console. “I’m not about to go through the rest of my life like my parents.” She says it with such conviction that he forgets she’s only twenty-seven years old. _She’s always been older than she seems,_ he says, remembering her at eighteen and feeling his heart leap into his throat recalling the terrible and wonderful audacity of her.

“I don’t want to wake up one day and realize my whole life has gone. I’m never as happy as I am with you, and it seems wrong to deny that whatever this is we have exists…”

“But why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

She looks up at him. “Because I thought you knew. All along…all these years…I though you knew. I thought you know and just didn't care."

"Oh, Audrey..." he starts. 

"And because the last time I opened my mouth and told you I loved you and wanted to marry you and have lots of babies with you, you bolted.”

He sighs, and it's painful; this is a conversation they maybe _should_ have had, but one they never had, not once. Not when she graduated from the Academy and made her way to Philadelphia to start her first job with the Bureau; not when they were partnered up for the first time, he as her supervisory agent; not when they flew to Chicago for the ballistics pattern lecture she’d helped him work on and she told him she’d married John the summer before she moved to Virginia for training; not even when he'd finally taken her, hard and furiously, against the wall of her hotel room five minutes later, forgetting how it felt to hear her call his name…

Certainly not when they’d been luxuriating in what was to become four long years of illicit assignations conducted in darkness of airport hotels and interstate motels.

But even now, she doesn’t ask the real question. He clears his throat and answers it anyway. 

“I never gave you what you needed. I didn’t think I ever could,” he says finally. “I _was_ afraid. I was so afraid. Audrey, it nearly killed me to leave you but I was so scared that if I didn’t, you’d be hurt, and I’d already caused so much pain—” he cuts himself off with a shake of his head, as his thoughts bend towards the tragedy that had been his entire life up until now. He swallows hard. “I never let myself imagine that it would be any different between you and me. You had John and I wanted to be happy for you…because everyone I’ve ever loved has been taken from me prematurely, Audrey. I worried if I let myself love you the way you deserved, I’d lose you forever.”

“Nothing was ever going to happen to me, Dale.”

“I thought the same thing about Caroline. About Annie.” He sighs. “How was I to know it wouldn’t happen to you, too.”

She stares out the window; the powerless fan uselessly circulates the damp air they’ve brought into the car with them, and every window is fogged up. Audrey lifts her finger to trace a heart into the glass. “Did you _ever_ love me, Dale? Really?”

And it breaks him to hear her ask that. She should have never had reason to doubt him. But he did leave her, standing in the middle of the apartment her father paid for, the one overlooking Elliot Bay—the one that was never _really_ his, she’s wrong about that, because he never lived there except out of his overnight bag, on weekends and holidays away from his office in Philadelphia—with tears in her eyes as he gracelessly extricated himself from a situation that scared him nearly as much as his harrowing ordeal with BOB and the Black Lodge, because now she was graduating and she was going to Quantico in the fall and she told him she loved him and he wasn’t ready to fall in love again even though _he was in love he was in love he was in love…_

_I’m still in love._

_I never_ _stopped_ _being in love._  

 _So tell her that_ …

He reaches over and takes her hand. “Audrey, I’ve loved you since—” _when?_ he wonders. _Flawless handwriting on a perfumed note beneath the door? Malts and fries, wrapped in blankets, telling him her secrets? Itchy palms in a hotel dining room?_

“Since?”

He sighs and brings her hand up to kiss it. “Since the first moment we met.” And it’s not just a line. He means it. He doesn’t know the last time he’s told her; clearly it’s been a while. But he means every single word.

“Really?”

He nods. “Really." 

Audrey’s eyes are on him. She shakes her head. “ **You can’t have it both ways** , Dale. Not anymore,” she tells him. “If it’s true and you really love me, you can’t be okay with _this,_ whatever the fuck this is. You just can’t.”

“I’m not—”

“Because there _has_ to be more. I’m not okay letting this be the rest of my life. Not now. Not after everything that’s happened, everything that is going to happen.”

“Well up until an hour ago I didn’t think—”

“And if you’re okay with this, then gosh, Dale, I don’t even know—”

He cuts her off this time. “You were really going to ask me to go with you to Reno?”

She stops and looks at him, saying nothing, her lips forming a small ‘Oh’ as she realizes that her plan has been found out. Then she nods. “Maybe it was presumptuous of me. But one of us had to make a move and it wasn’t going to be you. So I thought I’d try, and if you accepted, then we could make a fresh start,” she whispers, her voice barely registering above the beating of the rain on the roof of the car. “You and me, and…”

He looks at her—his beautiful Audrey—and he doesn’t hear the words she’s saying; he _feels_ them. She’s set to divorce her husband; she wants to be with him; most importantly, _he_ wants to be with _her._

 _He_ wants to be with _her._

More than anything in the world.

She still has her arms across her tummy; he shivers, and she shivers, and he turns up the heat on the dashboard.

“I’m really sorry about the coffee,” he says, staring at her hands as they massage her stomach. “It didn’t taste right to me either…”

“It’s not the coffee,” she says.

He rests his head against the headrest, face still turned towards her. She mirrors his pose, looking at him from across the car, and holds his gaze while saying nothing. The rain continues to beat overhead, and the heater fan whirrs loudly enough to overrun everything but his own mental pathways, which are screaming at him to say something and end the awkward silence.

Audrey beats him to it. “Dale…” she says. “There’s something you should know…”

And right then, in a heartbeat, the pieces fall into place.

_Six weeks._

_Quick divorce._

_Throwing up._

_“You and me, and…”_

He never could intuit her very well, but apparently he can’t deduce her either. And yet she can read him like a book, and as realization dawns on him, her eyes fill with tears. And it’s all he can do to keep himself composed.

“Audrey?” he asks, his voice a hair above a whisper, soft stupefaction on his lips.

She nods.


	5. The Rain is Ours and We Are Lovers of Heavy Weather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Who cares if we're under thundershowers?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Billie Marten's "Heavy Weather"

He ushers her back into the hotel room and  _ shushes _ the door closed behind them both before he says another word. He turns to face her, his cold hands gripping her equally chilled shoulders.

“You’re sure?” he asks.

She nods.

“ _ Absolutely _ sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she says through chattering teeth as she rolls her eyes.

Dale swallows and glances at the thermostat on the wall, which still hasn’t made the jump to room temperature. He pushes his wet hair off his forehead. “You should get into dry clothes,” he says, going to his small suitcase on the chair beneath the window.

“I don’t  _ have _ any dry clothes,” she says, holding her arms out from her sides. “This is all I brought."

Dale, fresh off a week in San Francisco, is more than prepared. He grabs a dark blue cable knit sweater for her from the corner of his bag and turns around to hand it to her. “Freshly laundered at the hotel just yesterday,” he tells her as he begins to unbutton the few buttons he’d done up on his own shirt, in his hurry to intercept her in the parking lot.

Audrey takes the sweater and sets it on the end of the bed, then begins to remove her clothing. Once again, her wet skirt drops to the floor in a heap; she labours to remove her clingy shirt with her shivering arms; Dale, sensing an opportunity to help, steps into the gap between them, lifting the hem of the shirt over her head and peeling it off her arms.

When it’s off, he can’t help but stare at the still-flat plane of her stomach; soft skin, dew-damp from the rain and goosepimpled from the cold, shines silver in refracted moonlight. He can’t imagine what it is she’s going through, what it feels like, to be carrying a child…

_ Our child…   _

Audrey catches his glance, covers her midsection with her arms briefly before realizing how silly it is and lowering them to her sides. He sees her fiddling with her fingers, an endearing nervous tic she’s always had for as long as he’s known her; she finally picks up the sweater and unfolds before slipping it over her head. “Of course it _is_  ours,” she says from within the shirt, as if reading his mind. “Just in case you were wondering.”

“I didn’t need to wonder,” he tells her, stepping forward as she slips her arms into the sleeves and her head appears through the neckline. The sweater is miles too big for her; the ends of the sleeves drape two inches past her fingertips. She looks ridiculous; Dale stifled a laugh.

“You came after me before you knew about the baby, right?”

He nods. “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says. “I honestly wasn't even expecting to find you."

“But now—” she chews on her lip. “Now that you  _ know _ … is _that_ the only reason—?”

“Audrey—" he says with a slow shake of his head, but she cuts him off.

“You’re not mad?”

Astonished, Dale furrows his brow. “Of course not! Audrey, _how_ could I be—”

She heaves a sigh that turns into a wretched sob as she lifts her sleeve-covered hands to her face and begins to cry.

He steps closer, slowly, and embraces her, as tightly as he thinks is okay, which is less than half as tightly as he’d like. “Ssh, honey…” he whispers into her hair.

“I want you to be with me because you  _ want _ to be with me, not because you  _ have _ to," she wails, her voice muffled but her hands. "This wasn’t a trap. I wasn’t trying to be sneaky. I only booked that ticket on a whim, just in case you wanted to come with me. I just…this just…”

“I don’t think—would never think—” he strokes her hair, her back, trying to calm her fears, but doesn’t finish his sentence because he doesn’t know how to explain to her that this all makes some kind of terrible sense, that this is exactly where they were supposed to be headed to all along, on a journey of a thousand signposts, long detours and shortcuts that bypassed some of the best moments of their lives. There were years between them they could never get back, but there were more ahead of them and he wasn’t about to let them slip away, especially not now that he knows how she feels about him. About _them_.

“It’s taken us longer to get here than most,” he tells her finally. “But—baby or not—oh, Audrey, this is where I want to be. I know that now…”

She shrugs her shoulders up and down against him and sighs heavily. “Don’t mind me,” she says, her lips level with the centre of his chest. He feels her voice knocking around inside his ribcage, ricocheting up his throat, until he’s sure he can taste her effervescent cadence floating on his tongue. “I’m just…more of a mess than usual these days, I suppose.”

"You're not," he whispers. He presses a kiss to her forehead as he pulls away and then gently leads her to the bed, opening the covers and insisting she get back in without saying a word. He remembers something about folic acid, but doesn’t know if it’s something needed during pregnancy or something to be avoided.  _ It’s a question for doctors… _

_ Doctors! _

“Do you have a doctor?” he asks suddenly.

Again, she nods.

“A  _ good _ one?”

She shrugs and sniffles. “I don’t know, I assume so. I’ve only seen her once.”

“And everything is okay?”

“Yes.”

"I want to meet her," he says. "When is your next appointment?"

"Two weeks," she replies.

He nods. “How do  _ you _ feel? Do you  _ feel _ okay?”

“I was wondering when you were going to ask me that… “

He pulls the blankets up and over her but she pushes herself up to sitting and blocks his attempt.

“Don’t baby me, Dale. Billions of women have given birth before me. I’m not some delicate flower just because I’m pregnant.”

Hearing the words— _ I’m pregnant _ —make Dale’s head spin. He sits down beside her and braces himself against the bed.

“Are  _ you _ okay?” she asks him then.

He stares at the thin grey-ish stripes embroidered into the white comforter that stretches over Audrey’s legs. “I just…I can’t believe it.”

And he couldn’t. He’d entered that hotel room at dusk with a very different set of plans in front of him.

“You’re  _ really _ pregnant?” he asks, softly reverent in tone.

She nods. “Mm-hmm. _Really_ really.”

He counts back six weeks to their last time together— _ At least it was a nice room _ , he thinks, remembering the down comforter on the King size bed where, it was obvious now, this whole thing began. “New York City,” he whispers.

Audrey’s hand finds his, and she covers his fingers with her own. “You should change,” she says.

“I will,” he tells her. “I promise—no more selfishness, no more bad decisions. Everything from now on, it’s focused—precise—all headed towards this one goal, which is—”

Audrey laughs. “Dale, I meant you should change your shirt,” she tells him, and he looks down at the damp, half-buttoned fiasco and feels a flush of embarrassment heat his cheeks. He stands up and removes his shirt, picking up Audrey’s clothes in the process of moving across the room, where he lays each article of clothing on the radiator, which has finally begun flooding the room with warm air. He arranges everything gently side by side.

“I meant it though,” he says. “Everything changes now.”

“It does?”

He nods as he turns back to her. “My apartment is too small so we’ll have to find another place,” he says as he crosses the room again to sit on the bed facing her. “Maybe you want to move back to Washington, to be close to family. I can transfer to Seattle. We can find a place big enough for the three of us—a nice apartment in the city, or a cottage somewhere if that’s what you prefer.”

He runs his hands over the bedspread again. “I don’t want to travel anymore for work,” he says. “And I think I could get a nice transfer, a desk job, something safe, something that will make sure I’m there, every night…every morning…”

Audrey sighs and tilts her head to the side. “Oh, Dale…”

“If you’ll have me,” he says finally, looking up at her across the bed. He hadn’t considered that she might not and the thought suddenly fills him with panic; he struggled to keep it very tightly under wraps, but hears it slipping over the edge of his words as he continues to speak. “Audrey, I swear, everything that’s happened between us…I’ve been such a fool all these years…”

She brings her hands up to the sides of his face; her skin is warm against his. “He needs to sign the papers first.”

Dale nods. “He will right?” he asks, sudden desperation on his tongue.

Audrey nods. “Let’s not worry about that now,” she tells him.

“It’s all I  _ can _ worry about.”

She smoothes her hands over his brow. “Don’t.”

He relaxes into her touch, closing his eyes as she closes the space between them and kisses him. It’s the gentlest of kisses too, something he hasn’t felt from her in years, since their hurried and harried affairs had stolen all the romance from them and replaced it with deadlines and darkness, turning it into something sinful, to be ashamed of.

That feeling is gone now. There’s hunger still—there’s always been hunger—but it’s tempered now, sweetened by tenderness. He’s utterly consumed by the overwhelming desire to protect her, and the little life growing inside her.

Of course he’s still afraid, but won’t run. Not again. There is no more BOB. No more demons to conquer. He’s vanquished them all; the last step is to claim his prize, save the princess, and ride off into the sunset.

He’s not entirely sure, but when Audrey slides her arms around his shoulders and pulls him down to her, he wonders if perhaps  _ he  _ isn’t the one who needed to be saved after all…

“Can we?” he asks suddenly, breaking from the kiss as he leans up on his elbow. He’s careful to avoid putting his weight on her body.

“We just did,” she whispers. “A few hours ago, remember?”

He looks down between them and rests a hand against her belly, a surge of unreserved affection flooding through him. “I love you, Audrey.”

Audrey smiles. “I know,” she tells him.

He caresses her stomach. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

“But when has anything ever been easy for us?” she asks with a casual shrug as she brings her arms up once more around his neck. “Are you happy, Dale?”

It’s an odd question, but for the first time in a very long time, he is able to answer honestly. “Yeah,” he nods slowly. “Audrey, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.” He smiles down at her. “Are  _ you _ ?”

“ **When you’re happy, I’m happy** ,” she replies. “So I think I’m fairly ecstatic.”

Dale regards her gently, kisses her again, and lowers his hand between them…

^♢^

He thinks it’s moonlight that lights her features when next he opens his eyes, but in the moment it takes for his vision to adjust, he realizes that it’s far too bright, buttery-warm and melting from the window pane to spread across the room. It’s sunlight—not bright sunlight, not clear sky sunlight, but the kind that filters in through wispy clouds before a rainstorm. But it’s enough to be notable, and poignant. And he realizes all at once that it’s been years since last he saw Audrey by the morning’s light.

No longer cast in shades of blue-black and alabaster, he sees colours in her that he forgot could exist in nature. Her hair fires brilliantly, strands of burnished copper and rich shades of brown adding dimension and sheen where once he thought there was nothing but black. Her skin glows, creamy pink across the apples of her cheeks. He recalls in a sudden flash of remembrance that her eyes are brilliant blue; he hasn’t seen them gleam their brightest in he doesn’t know how long.

He’ll call Philadelphia and cash in his vacation days, and together he and Audrey will fly to Reno that afternoon. They’ll hold hands as they board the plane and no one will question that they belong together. Her marriage will dissolve—that part won’t be easy, except in that unique way that Reno divorces are easy—and he imagines she’ll need time to cry and grieve but maybe she’s done that already, and maybe once the papers are signed she’ll cry happy tears as they depart for wherever it is they decide to go next.

He kisses the spot beside her eye and lets her sleep, wrapped in soft blankets, safe and warm at his side as the sun rose outside their window and on the rest of their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God that was fluffy. I don't know why I pivot to fluff so quickly...I don't even like fluff. But in any case, here we are. Thanks so much to RedemptionByFire for the prompts and for letting me string all five together into one longer story!


End file.
